Today, if you’re trying to decide whether or not to go surfing, you can go on the internet and get detailed current conditions for just about every popular surf spot on earth. Many locations have live web cams. Surfline tells you in advance not only what day of the week, but what time of day it thinks the waves will be best in each area. So what did surfers do before the internet?
Of course, you could just load up your car and head to the beach to check it in person. But that takes time. And at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, conditions can and do change pretty rapidly. So a more informed, targeted approach was obviously preferable for people who didn’t live close to the beach.
One method of getting information was to call up someone you knew who lived near the beach. But unless that person was a really good friend, you couldn’t be doing that every day, especially when scores of other people would be trying the same tactic. And if the waves were good, your contact may have been already in the water.
Wise Surfboards used to do a recorded phone message describing current conditions and tides every day. But they would only post it at around 10 am, giving a nice 3-hour cushion for people who had already paddled out earlier. You could call the shop directly, but if they didn’t know you, they’d be evasive, or say “this isn’t the surf report line,” etc. If Glenn answered and you asked him for a surf report, he’d just hang up on you.
So many of us ended up having to do our own surf forecasting. My two main tools were a printed tide chart and a Radio Shack weather radio (I still have mine!) Weather radios broadcast a recorded message, updated every few hours, and still running to this day, featuring a monotonal voice reciting NOAA buoy readings, winds, and forecasted sea conditions. This entire program was really geared towards boaters, but a lot of surfers knew about it. I remember going to bed with the weather radio next to my ear, and when the offshore buoy, or particularly the Point Arena buoy gave a reading with a wave period of 16 seconds or greater, I’d have a hard time sleeping that night.
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